I Started a Joke: "PBR&B" and What Genres Mean Now

On March 22, 2011, I tweeted something about music. This by itself is not rare. Nor is the fact that I thought about an idea for less than a minute, cobbled together a bit of snarky wordplay, and posted something to make my insignificant number of followers momentarily think I was clever. Here’s the tweet—a lazy three-pronged trend piece in miniature, topped by a term you may now be familar with: "PBR&B." The tweet garnered a grand total of 9 RTs and 14 favorites. Not bad for a minute's work, I suppose, but not exactly remarkable. Consider me shocked and appalled, then, to learn a couple months ago that "PBR&B" had earned its own Wikipedia page.

How did this happen? In the few days after the tweet went up, a few of my music critic friends used the phrase "PBR&B" as a handy shortcut to link together a few artists. The next day at the Village Voice’s music blog Sound of the City—where I was freelancing at the time—critic Sean Fennessey used it when writing about new mixtapes from The Weeknd and Frank Ocean. "SOTC buddy and writer Eric Harvey, while aligning Ocean and the Weeknd with Tom Krell's cracked R&B strip-down How To Dress Well, cheekily dubbed this movement 'PBR&B,' the implication being that this is rhythm and blues by or for hipsters," he wrote. "Which is sort of true, but only in the way it's been presented."

From there, it kept going. The next day, Vulture published a short news item: "Hilarious New Subgenre Alert." A week later, The Awl had dubbed "PB&RB" "offensive." That August, Nitsuh Abebe compiled a list of artists who make "R&B with an indie affect" for New York magazine, onto which an editor slapped the headline "PBR&B Ten Pack." By the end of the year—the time when critics are compiling lists and looking for narratives—writers and readers were all forced to grapple with my silly little invention. The New York Post awkwardly positioned the "amusing" PBR&B in contrast to Rihanna, Chris Brown, and Will.i.am. In Slate’s year-end critic’s roundtable, Carl Wilson opted for "R-Neg-B" as "an alternative to Eric Harvey’s clever but too reductive 'PBR&B'", which itself was prompted by Katherine St. Asaph’s thoughtful observations about the term at another simultaneous critical roundtable (in which I participated) at Sound of the City.

By August 2012, Spin had already declared"the rise of 'PBR&B 2.0'", apparently triggered by Frank Ocean’s first official LP, as well as artists like Miguel and Holy Other. Then in a Complex interview a month later, How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell—one of the acts I’d initially mentioned in my tweet—was asked about the term; he (rightfully) called it "tacky." That same fall, "PBR&B" somehow made it into the scholarly journal American Speech, in an article about "the fragmented world of twenty-first-century popular music genres and subgenres." "In March 2011," the authors wrote, "Village Voice writer Eric Harvey took to Twitter to christen hipster-friendly R&B music with the clever label PBR&B. While perhaps intended initially as a joke poking fun at the absurdly narrow focus of contemporary 'microgenres,' the term has found some success since its coinage." You’re telling me.

I have mixed feelings about being linked to such a phenomenon. Don't get me wrong—it’s cool to have my name on Wikipedia, but I’d rather such an honor be for something I put a bit more time into, or, well, am actually proud of. I still think "PBR&B" is silly-if-not-catchy, though misleading yes, and even offensive to some—particularly the artists forced to suffer the indignity of having their music classified under the heading of a snarky joke.

If someone else came up with "PBR&B", I would resent them. I "coined" it for the simple reason that it's a pun, and I love puns. But I didn't exactly coin it to describe the music itself. (Its grandfather genre, "Rhythm and Blues", is another story. That was coined by Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler in 1949, to replace "Race Records", the offensive name of a chart used at the time to rank the popularity of music made by African-Americans.) Instead, it’s one of those genres that describes an imagined fanbase. As Fennessey claimed in that article, there was a brief moment a few years ago when a handful of artists who nominally made R&B were doing so in a way that allowed certain observers to group them together. This happens regularly with any type of popular music, and R&B is no exception. The difference with "PBR&B" is that I cobbled together three artists who were doing drastically different things, more or less because they were making music that had the capacity to "cross over," in old industry parlance. In more modern terms, it’s music rooted in African-American traditions that…well, to put it bluntly, might sell to young white people for whom other types of more rhythm-focused or bluesy modern R&B might not.

A decade earlier, the story goes, young white people—often referred to with the even vaguer term "hipster"—started co-opting a Milwaukee-brewed beer founded in 1844 because it was inexpensive and not incessantly target-marketed toward them (which, of course, then started target-marketing them). The connection between PBR and “hipster” is enough that lots of music fans didn’t need it explained any further. On a smaller scale, perhaps, I’d made my own "chillwave," itself a genre that many are loath to actually say aloud, but which at the same time did describe a sensibility uniting a group of emergent artists. It’s not an artist’s fault that their music appeals to certain audiences, and a label like "PBR&B" certainly doesn’t make it any easier to understand the music of Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, HTDW, Miguel, or Holy Other. But the evidence is there, on Wikipedia: My silly pun made this music easier to discuss for a lot of people.

This is what genres do really well, for good and for ill: They make large amounts of music easier to talk about (and, by extension, sell). Most often, genres do not stand up to scrutiny, yet they’re a fundamental part not only of music discussions online and off, but of any conversations we have about culture more generally. Particularly with the infinite online options for music access and conversation, pithy and memorable genre names can make it easier (if not necessarily accurate) to classify, discuss, and compare music. Genres arise out of tastes, and are often institutionalized (I wrote about one such example here), though online there’s infinitely more space to create, market, sort and search by micro-genres. (Remember "witch house"?) People have lengthy, years-long arguments using genres as combatants. If nothing else, genres make music easier to fight about.

These online pathways are what fueled the "rise" of "PBR&B." The tendency is to say that the term "went viral," but that metaphor disguises more than it reveals. "Viral" metaphorically describes the manner in which online communication proliferates like spreading a cold: We pass something to others simply by virtue of coming into contact with (or "being infected by") something. But links aren’t sneezes. Things get passed around online because people have specific reasons to do so—whether citing them and adding to the conversation, fiercely disagreeing with them, and so on. The numerous citations of "PBR&B" I cited earlier, not to mention the numerous others listed on the Wikipedia page, were replying to something someone else had said, and then adding something (positive and negative) to the conversation. Writers chuckled at the coinage while using it. Editors added the term to headlines of articles, perhaps for search-engine optimization purposes. Others on message boards, blogs, and other online publications critiqued it. We call things "viral" for the same reason we use pithy genres, actually—because it’s shorthand for something we’re too busy to dig deeper and investigate.

"PBR&B" spread because lots of people were talking about these particular artists, but the artists themselves were left out of such conversations. That's how it usually happens: Their work is left to be sorted like cereal boxes, independent of their own agency. Artists are sometimes asked by fans and inexperienced journalists to describe the "type of music" they make, and they’re often rightfully itchy about making these distinctions themselves. It’s not so much that there’s a right or wrong to genres, but it’s more the case that genres are power moves, able to define music far beyond any artist’s own wishes. This point was made very well in 2009 by Das Racist’s Victor Vasquez, in a smart response to Sasha Frere-Jones’ claim that rap as a genre was "dead." Genres, Vasquez argued (through the lens of literary theory), "are only useful to the extent to which they can help organize texts. The point at which they actually serve to define texts is when they can enter a lens of scrutiny so intense as to render them meaningless." Meaningless, but still powerful. This is what bothers me so much about "PBR&B," this stupid thing I spawned two and a half years ago. I started a joke, but I’m still worried about who is affected by the punchline.